my family computer (athlon 1700+, Asus A7N8X-X motherboard, 1gb DDR ram, running XP Pro) recently started behaving very strangely. after completely shutting it down (ie, not standby or hibernating), it randomly turns on again by itself. come downstairs in the morning, it's running at the login screen, even though i shut it off the night before. come home from work, same thing. there is no one else home that would be turning it on during these periods. short of always turning the power off manually with the switch on the PSU every time i'm finished with it, does anyone have any idea why it keeps turning itself back on? could viral activity somehow be causing it? electrical noise? something acting screwy with some kind of Wake on LAN feature? any input is appreciated. thanks Dave

Wake on Lan of course. Why are you turning it off in the first place? Just out of curiosity.... You should be running some sort of surge protection or a power center. Then, you'd have individual power controls for each device (tower, printer, monitor, etc.) That's what I use. Protects the phone line going to the DSL modem as well. Life's more painless for the brainless.

The A7N8X-X is an excellent board. Highly overclockable & plenty of BIOS settings available to tweak. I hope you're taking advantage of it. Make sure to run your RAM at 100%, not AUTO or SPD. Check for the "wake on" settings & make sure they're disabled. And you shouldn't be using standby or hibernate with a desktop machine.

as i said, i am not using standby or hibernate. in fact, i think both options suck. i turn the computer off at night to save power. all that computer has is a basic surge-protecting power bar. i can't justify spending the money it would take to get a UPS for a family computer. how is it that Wake on LAN could suddenly start causing problems? the computer has been fine for years, and it just started randomly turning on last week. it uses a wireless PCI card to connect to the internet through a router. no dialup modem. could there be some electrical interference being received by the wireless card triggering wake on lan? like i said, never been an issue until last week. Dave

PS: all power management features in the bios that involve turning on the computer were already disabled, including wake on PCI (including LAN), wake on PS/2 keyboard, and wake on modem. so it's not that. Dave

Maybe you have a smart dog. Have you also disabled similiar options in WinXP? I suggest you shutoff the power strip. That is a safer way to protect from damage due to power fluctuations than simply shutting down. Look in Control panel> power options> advanced, to verify you are shutting the computer down and not placing in standby. Be apprised there is always power to the MBoard of an ATX computer unless the AC is interrupted somehow.

Maybe you have a wild midget hiding in your couch cushions, that likes to press buttons? Have you noticed anything else on, like a tv.